Why didn’t unions stop sexual harassment?

Many of the revelations about sexual harassment —and worse—that tumbled forth in recent weeks centered on two heavily unionized industries: Hollywood and the news media. Why didn’t their labor unions stop Harvey Weinstein and the others?

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The reasons, according to interviews with union officials, women’s advocates, and legal experts, include the “gig” nature of much Hollywood employment; a reluctance by victims to report abuse to anyone, including union reps, for fear of retaliation; and the labor movement’s own male-dominated culture, itself no stranger to sexual harassment.

“They’ve had a checkered history, just like employers have a checkered history,” said Joe Mastrosimone, an associate dean at the Washburn University School of Law, who specializes in labor law.

In Hollywood, organized labor operates on the craft union model. Aspiring young actresses (and set designers and camera operators) aren’t employed by studios, but rather by individual TV or motion picture productions on a gig basis. That means Hollywood unions must monitor scores of business entities — compared with, say, the United Auto Workers, which operates on the industrial-union model and deals mostly with three big car companies.

In Weinstein’s case, most harassment allegations fall outside the scope of producers’ contract with SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents movie and TV actors (and also many broadcast journalists). In two cases detailed in The New York Times, Weinstein invited women to breakfast meetings at a hotel, then made inappropriate advances. In another case, Weinstein allegedly assaulted actress Paz de la Huerta at her homein New York.

We may assume all three women had SAG-AFTRA memberships, because it’s nearly impossible to get work as a film or TV actress without one. But SAG-AFTRA protections take effect only after an actress is hired, excluding the after-hours networking that’s usually necessary to get hired. Recall that the Hollywood cliché, “casting couch,” describes the extraction of sexual favors from job-seekers, not jobholders.

The fallout from the Weinstein case is prompting SAG-AFTRA to rethink how it protects members, president Gabrielle Carteris said in an interview.

“These situations you’re hearing about, these are all prior to coming into our contract world,” Carteris said. “When somebody is going into casting or an audition or they’re going to meet a producer, that’s not in our contract. Our contract lives and breathes on the set they’re working.” She said she’s now seeking new ways to work with members outside of contracted hours.

Women who are reluctant to report a manager’s sexual harassment to higher-ups appear no more eager to report such conduct to their unions. Michael Oreskes resigned as news director of NPR after The Washington Post unearthed allegations that, years earlier, when he was Washington bureau chief at The New York Times, he kissed two women who came to see him about a job.

The New York Times is represented by the NewsGuild, formerly known as the Newspaper Guild. But Grant Glickson, president of the NewsGuild of New York, said the union never received any complaint about Oreskes. As a result of the allegations, the guild is forming a women’s group to discuss ways to prevent sexual harassment, he said.

Oreskes is alleged to have continued the pattern of sexual harassment at NPR, which is represented by SAG-AFTRA. In one alleged incident, Oreskes allegedly told a female subordinate about his “sex girlfriend” during a networking dinner. The woman reported the incident to NPR’s human resources department, but it is unclear whether the union ever got involved.

SAG-AFTRA spokeswoman Pamela Greenwalt declined to comment on the Oreskes case specifically, but said generally that the NPR contract would apply off-site.

To be sure, unions handle some individual sexual harassment claims brought to them by members, but these are often addressed through private arbitration or other private dealings with employers, union officials and legal experts said. Because such negotiations are confidential, the public doesn’t hear about them.

But in most harassment cases, unions play no role at all, even in heavily unionized sectors. It’s a problem that extends well beyond labor — across all industries, as many as 70 percent of people who experience sexual harassment at work never report it to a supervisor, manager or union rep, according to a 2016 report by the EEOC. More subtle forms of harassment stay secret even longer; only 8 percent of people who experience unwanted touching ever report it, according to the EEOC report.

“The most common response is to talk about it with family members, friends, even colleagues, which may not result in action,” said Laura Palumbo, a spokeswoman for the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. “They anticipate a negative reaction: disbelief on their claim, inaction on their claim.”

A final barrier that keeps women from reporting harassment incidents to their unions may be the unions themselves.

Two of the nation’s largest labor organizations — the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union — dismissed top staffers in recent weeks over sexual harassment allegations. At SEIU, two staffers who led the union’s campaign for a $15 minimum wage were dismissed for allegedly harassing female staffers. The AFL-CIO’s chief budget officer, Terry Stapleton, resigned Nov. 6 as Bloomberg prepared a story that he’d been disciplined for sending lewd text messages to a secretary and for pressuring her to come to his hotel room.

Sexual harassment “has been an ongoing problem for unions, especially those that were initially heavily male,” said Wilma Liebman, a former union attorney who served on the National Labor Relations Board. “It’s been a hard issue to deal with.”

At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Anita Hill hearings in 1991, Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was accused of sexually harassing two subordinates when he was chief at the EEOC. (He denied it, and continues to do so.) An anguished national conversation ensued about sexual harassment, and many organizations vowed to take the matter more seriously going forward. But Sunu Chandy, who was a trial attorney at the EEOC’s New York office from 1999-2014, said unions remained resistant to litigating complaints that they didn’t regard as “traditional” labor issues, such as pay and benefits. Union locals, she said, would slow-walk sexual harassment claims.

“It seemed to me when these issues played out, sexual harassment was not on the top of the list,” said Chandy, now legal director at the National Women’s Law Center. “If there was sexual or racial harassment, it wasn’t taken as seriously.”

Perhaps this time unions will change. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka opened the group’s national convention last month by reading a line about sexual harassment from the group’s code of conduct and gave out information for two union officials in charge of looking into such claims. And SAG-AFTRA will host a Nov. 14 panel discussion on sexual harassment in Los Angeleswith women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred.

“This is an incredible opportunity for us to shift culture,” Carteris said, adding that she’s been in many conversations with industry leaders. “We must find a way to give power and voice to our members.”